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Patient Experience: Does it all come down to wearing sensible shoes?

The plane’s preflight music was Celine Dion, and i felt my IQ beginning to drop. Her music has the same effect on me as a Vulcan nerve pinch, making me want to curl into a fetal position. Given the choice of having to listen to an entire Celine Dion CD or sticking finger in an electrical outlet, I would give the outlet serious consideration.

Men are to talking about golf the way their counterparts are to talking about sensible shoes, only worse. Personally, I would rather listen to the discussion about espadrilles. Case in point. The gentleman on the flight. His shoes looked like they were woven from the skins of chicken ears.

“I was playing the thirteenth hole at Augusta…”–or some place, the place didn’t matter to me any more than what followed.

“Do you play?” I nodded. “What’s your handicap?”

“My swing,” I said. He smiled at me indulgently, like Ward Cleaver might have looked at June if she had accidentally dropped a brownie on the new carpet.

“The hole cat-legged to the right, and I have a natural slice. And there were three bunkers about a hundred and eighty yards out, hidden by a berm at one-seventy. You can sense my problem, can’t you.” I wanted to tell him that I did, and that it wasn’t anything that counseling couldn’t correct.

“I had my three-wood and I was playing a Titlest Pro–and you know what that means. The temperature was eighty-one, a ten-knot headwind, and the humidity had to be thirty-four. And since there was a waning moon, gosh only knows what that was going to do to the rotation of the ball once it reached altitude. I can’t even begin to tell you how nervous I was about having to figure in the curvature of the earth on the flight of the ball.”

“What kind of shoes were you wearing?” I asked.

I’ve read novels about the training snipers undergo to learn how to calculate the flight of a bullet and it seemed a lot less complicated than what this guy had to consider with his golf ball. I deja-vued to the scene in the movie “Airplane” when the woman seated next to the film’s protagonist on the plane hanged herself rather than having to keep listening to the whinging of the man next to her.

Not wanting to hear about the other seventeen holes, I pulled out my laptop, plugged in my earbuds, looked out of the plane’s window and tried to determine what affect the curvature of the earth would have on my writing. Negligible.

When I ponder the complexities of healthcare I wonder why payers–the dark side, and providers eschew fixing the easy problems. Population health management, ACOs, and the Affordable Care Act–the oxymoron is theirs not mine are very complex issues affecting both parties. These issues mandate that a lot of their strategic initiatives should be planned on an Etch-A-Sketch using a wije-board. Goodness knows how you run a business effectively when weekly Washington is firing SAMs at your attempts to figure it all out.

Just what are the easy problems being overlooked? Patient/Customer/Consumer experience.

Payers are going from a B to B model to a B to C model. Raise your hand if you enjoy calling your insurance company. Can you imagine what it will be like trying to get someone to talk to you in a retail insurance market? “The average wait time to speak with an agent is expected to be three-and-a-half weeks.” Payers should Google the word “churn.” People are going to be jumping off of that bandwagon like fleas off a dog sporting a new flea-and-tick collar.

Providers are starting to wonder where there next dollar is coming from. Clinics stole away many of their most profitable offerings, so they’ve been trying to add primary care providers (PCPs) to lock in revenues. Retailers (think CVS and Walgreens) hijacked many of the most profitable and most frequented offerings of the PCPs, so we can say goodbye to those revenues.

With that being the case, it would seem sensible to focus on any strategy that might help retain patients, customers, and consumers. Gone are the days when a provider could say “we don’t have customers, we have patients.” Without paying attention to the experiences and expectations of whatever you call them you will have neither.

The value payers and providers place on customers is very different from the value customers place on payers and providers. And the value gap is getting wider each time either organization fails to answer its phones, and fails to provide a way for a customer to complete their business online.

People need two things from their provider–they need to get better, and they need to be able to do business with their provider. With payers they need their claim to be covered and they need to do business with their payer.

Currently, the only way to do business with either one is to call them. And the people who have to make those calls would rather sit and listen to someone talk about golf than having to call.

Since neither business will ever provide a service that enables people to conduct all of their business needs correctly, one hundred percent of the time without being placed on hold or transferred to someone else who will not be able to help them, why not design a customer portal that can meet correctly, efficiently, and effectively all of their needs every time?

It all comes down to access.

A remarkable experience for every person every time on every device. It’s not a pipe dream, it’s a requirement.